Degrees of Separation
by NotesfromaClassroom
Summary: Sherlock is rarely confused...except where his feelings are concerned.


**Degrees of Separation**

 **Disclaimer: Just having fun here. Set after 4 x 12, "A View With a Room."**

"What's that noise?" Watson squints slightly, searching for the source of the sound.

A foolish error, carrying the letter in his jacket pocket. Of course Watson would hear it crumple when he sat down. Her hearing is no match for his, but her power of observation is formidable.

Sherlock pats his chest and makes the letter crumple again, louder.

"This? Just my notes."

Watson lifts one eyebrow, a signal of her skepticism. No wonder. He almost never commits notes to paper. For a moment he thinks she's going to call him on the lie, but her expression softens. _She suspects._ He'll have to be more careful in the future.

If there is a future. This is the first letter he's had from Irene—from _Moriarty_ —in four months. He'd almost given up his weekly trip to his Bronx mailbox, but last Tuesday he found the letter folded in with the usual pile of pizza fliers and slick ads for legal aid. Ordinarily he would have waited to return home before reading it, but that day he'd opened it almost reverently and stood anchored in the lobby of the post office like a stone in a stream, people detouring around him.

The tone of this letter is markedly different from her earlier missives—more resigned, with none of the bravado about beating the system and walking free. Especially troubling are the veiled allusions to an end of their correspondence—something he should welcome but doesn't. This letter, in particular, reads like a tenuous link to _Irene_ —not Moriarty— all three handwritten pages heartfelt and lonely.

The contents are memorized, of course, but he's taken to carrying the letter with him rather than consigning it with the others in the beehive.

And now Watson knows. Or suspects, which for such a gifted observer amounts to the same thing.

His other secret she'd ferretted out, too, though not from any carelessness on his part. When she'd pulled T. S. Eliot's _Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats_ from her satchel he'd been genuinely shocked, caught off guard in a way that almost never happens to him.

He'd bought it at Bauman Rare Books the afternoon he received Irene's letter, taking the #6 train to the 59th Street Station, walking the last few blocks in a rare mental fog. The proprietor knew him well enough to register mild surprise at the purchase, not Sherlock's usual fare of out-of-print crime compendia. From Bauman he'd gone directly to Pentillion-Edge and left the book with the receptionist, a hastily scribbled sticky note telling Fiona that in light of her interest in cats, he hoped she would enjoy poetry about them. Why poetry, even now he can't say. It's not something he ever reads, though Watson appreciates it. To mark his first year of sobriety she'd given him an old lithograph inscribed with the last stanza of Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening."

"No hidden meaning," she'd told him. "I just saw it and thought you'd like it."

But that's the problem with poetry, even lines as well worn as Frost's "miles to go before I sleep." There's always hidden layers there—if not in the context of the poem, then in the genre itself, its necessary brevity requiring and implying a level of intimacy between poet and reader—or between giver and receiver.

Eliot isn't Shakespeare, of course, and _Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats_ isn't a love sonnet. It's not even, as far as Sherlock can tell, particularly good poetry, though popular enough to be transformed into a dreadful long-running musical. He's not seen it, though he enjoyed John Guare's snarky dismissal of it in _Six Degrees of Separation_ , a play Irene had insisted he attend with her during a revival on the West End. At the time he'd gone to humor her, finding little of interest in the story of gullible New Yorkers fooled by a gifted con artist pretending to be someone he isn't. The only line of the play Sherlock found memorable was a minor character's airy " _Aeschylus_ did not _invent_ the _theatre_ to have it end up a bunch of chorus kids in cat suits prancing around wondering which of them will _go_ to _kitty_ _-_ _cat heaven_."

Now he wonders if Irene—if _Moriarty_ —had been offering him a chance to see through her own pretense—or more likely, daring him to. Layers of meaning in the play—in watching the hapless Manhattanites flailing in frustration at being so thoroughly taken in.

Irony, certainly, to consider his similar fall.

Until Watson pulled the book from her satchel, he hadn't considered how the play and the book and Irene and Fiona were, in some fashion, connected. Surely he wasn't that crass, his clumsy attempt to reach out to Fiona an even clumsier attempt to shift the weight in his chest put there by Irene's letter. The idea horrified him.

"You like _like_ her," Watson had teased, but that wasn't it, or wasn't all of it. He's only had a handful of conversations with Fiona, and though he was outwardly twitchy and awkward with her, he was surprised at how easy he felt inside—how being with someone so unabashedly honest meant he could let go his usual attentive diligence when talking to anyone else. No scanning her facial tics for signs of deceit, no cataloguing her posture in anticipation of her next move.

"I'm more difficult—more work—than most people," she told him, but he found the opposite was true. If Moriarty is the double-sided Kandinsky masterpiece at the heart of _Six Degrees of Separation_ , Fiona is a Leonardo da Vinci inked sketch—clear and purposeful and straightforward.

Watson saw the connection between Fiona and Irene right away, brushing away his insistence that he was protecting Fiona by not pursuing her further. He was, Watson insisted, more concerned about himself.

"Irene—Moriarty—whatever you want to call her, you loved her. She broke your heart; I get it. Just because she did doesn't mean Fiona will, too."

She was right, of course. Not about what Fiona might or might not do, but about his own selfish concern. If he was resolved to stay away from her before, Watson's words cemented the idea.

Or did, until Fiona's late night visit to the brownstone. At her offer to kiss him he'd been on the verge of explaining why he never would—and then the moment passed and he realized his resolve had passed with it.

Since then he's sought her out twice, both times for chaste cups of coffee, their mutual skittishness a relief and a source of frustration, at least for Sherlock.

Which leaves him with carrying the letter in his pocket, like a talisman against the plague.

He leans back in the chair closest to the fire, slowly to keep the letter from drawing Watson's attention again. She's stretched out on the sofa across the room, a pile of his cold case folders in her lap. It's touching, really, how she validates his trust in her this way, doggedly going through them from time to time.

"Shouldn't you be getting ready?" he asks. "It's almost 7."

Watson snorts and shakes her head. "Some Valentine's Day, huh?"

"Your date?"

"Canceled. Something came up at the last minute, he said. Some emergency. It's okay."

Sherlock shifts forward. "You don't believe him."

"It doesn't matter. We only met that one time. It did feel a little weird to plan to get together tonight."

"Because?"

"Don't you pay attention to anything?" Watson says, the ghost of a smile on her face. "Don't answer that. You pay attention to _everything_. You get that Valentine's Day is a holiday for lovers, right?"

"And the fortunes of card companies and candy makers, yes. What does that have to do about your dinner date?"

Watson gathers the files and sets them on the sofa beside her. "It's just—I agree that Valentine's Day is sort of a fake commercial holiday, but it's also fraught with symbolism, too."

"And you didn't want to impart more meaning in the dinner than is currently there," Sherlock says. Watson tilts her head to the side, considering.

"Yeah, that's it. So I'm okay with staying in tonight. I've got a date with these," she says, gesturing to the files at her side. "What about you? You going anywhere?"

"I am not," he says promptly. If Watson is fishing for information about Fiona, he has nothing to share. He debated all week whether to ask her to a meal tonight but despite his pretended ignorance, the symbolism of the day is all too obvious to him as well. Another time he'll invite her for an actual meal, after he gives up the letter to the beehive with all the others.

"Care for some help?" he says. "They are, after all, my cases and no one knows the pitfalls of each better than I."

For a moment he thinks Watson is going to turn him down—she certainly doesn't need his help, and he's already admitted his own failure in each of the cold cases. Then something changes in her posture and she pats the sofa beside her. "Sure," she says. "It'll be fun."

"Back in a jiffy," he says, heading up the stairs. He knows she will think he's going to the loo but he makes his way to his bedroom instead. There he unwraps the other book he purchased last week at Bauman, a first edition of Robert Frost's _New Hampshire_ , a collection of poems including "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." It was twice what _Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats_ cost but Sherlock was glad to find a decent copy. He'd had an eye out for one since Watson gave him the lithograph, thinking he would save it for a special occasion—Christmas or a birthday, perhaps.

From practice Sherlock knows which floorboards to avoid stepping on in Watson's room. He hardly needs to be this cautious—he can redecorate her room around her without waking her. Years of learning to sleep in the surgical residents' break room at the hospital have left her the soundest sleeper he knows. Indeed, he often worries what would happen if a real intruder ever broke in—or if a fire broke out.

Picking his way across the room to her bed, he sets the book on her pillow.

Layers of symbolism—a book of poetry, and on Valentine's Day at that. It can't be helped. As tangled as his feelings are for Irene, as drawn as he is toward Fiona, it is with Watson where he is most at peace, where he is most himself.

Where he is most confused, too, with feelings he hardly acknowledges and deliberately ignores.

"Are you ever coming back?" Watson's voice carries up the stairs.

He's complicating things by leaving the book here. For a moment he hesitates, his hand outstretched.

"Sherlock?"

He pulls his hand back and leaves the book on her pillow. With careful tread, he backtracks out of her room.

"On my way!"

The book will have to speak for him.

Note: A little Valentine's Day gift for you! If you aren't familiar with Guare's _Six Degrees of Separation,_ you probably DO know the concept of "six degrees of separation"-that is, that every person on earth is connected to every other person on earth if you can trace the right six connections. (I know my uncle who knows a seafood distributor who knows a sous chef in New York who knows the sous chef who works in the White House who knows the current President who is married to Michelle-so in six steps I am connected to Ms. Obama. Not really...but that's the idea.) Ironically, the title implies separation while the concept focuses on our connections to each other. That intersection is what I wanted to explore in this little fic. Plus, it's fun to see the connection between Eliot's book about cats and Guare's mockery of Andrew Lloyd Webber's _Cats_ in _Six Degrees of Separation_ -and to imagine Moriarty taking Sherlock to see it, almost hoping he will figure out that she is as much of an impostor as the main character in the play.


End file.
